Lesson video

Welcome to today's English lesson.

I'm Mrs Crompton.

Our focus today is to review our learning on writing skills and to look at the complete writing process.

You will need a pen and paper.

Take a moment to make sure you've cleared any distractions away and have everything you need to hand.

So, as a process, we need to recap on everything that we have covered, and I just want to bring it down to these five steps so that moving forwards, you can work through these techniques to ensure that you have the best possible written response that you could achieve.

So our writing process is to think about the question, about the task, about the effect we want to achieve.

Then to go to the planning stage and to think about the purpose and be even more precise in terms of the detail of our response.

We need to draught and critique, and if I could I'd put those side by side because we need to do that process in tandem, thinking about trying something out, critiquing it, making amendments.

And only once we have done all of those steps, do we get to the process of writing the final outcome.

So think, plan, draught, critique, and write.

And we are going to go through all those steps in one lesson.

Are you ready? Okay, let's begin.

So let's start with think.

Think is generating your ideas for the piece of writing.

Let's have a look at our options today.

So we have got, write a description as suggested by this image, as one option.

So we've got the title across the top and an image underneath.

Or, you have got an alternative.

Write a story about time travel.

And we often see this, where you are given a choice of either doing a descriptive response or a narrative response.

So the first thing that you need to do is to make that decision.

Are you going to go for the story or are you going to go for the description? As a little bit of a help, we've got some questions just to warm you up a little bit.

What would time travel actually allow you to do? What would be the question that you would want to answer if you were travelling in time? And you've got that single question that you are going to revolve all your events around.

What's it going to be? So what does time travel allow you to achieve? If you're doing the description, think again about what you could include.

So just pause at this point.

Initial thinking at this stage is what ideas have you got, are you going to go for description or narrative.

Just take two minutes on this.

We're going to keep coming back to it and you're allowed to change your mind.

So pause, resume when you're ready.

Okay, let's have a look at this idea of time travel and what we're going to do is to just look at an extract from 'The Time Machine' by H.

G.

Wells.

'The Time Machine' is a science fiction novel published in 1895 and it's often read as a warning against progress whilst exploring class conflicts.

So if you look at the dates there, just turn of the century, lots of things happening in terms of industrialization expanding massively, and class is one of the things that really becomes an area of huge divide and conflict, and H.

G.

Wells wanted to talk about that.

But equally, he's fascinated by the progress.

And a science fiction novel is all about exploring what if.

What if x carried on in that way? What would the world look like? And it's often known as the literature of what ifs, and it's always grounded in a factual detail around progress and projecting that into the future.

So in H.

G.

Wells' novel, the society that he travels to in the future is split into the Elois and the Morlocks.

The Elois are the descendants of the upper classes and the Morlocks, the working classes, and they literally live underground in tunnels.

However, there's a little bit of a twist.

The Elois are physically and intellectually quite weak.

The Morlocks work collectively but they're controlled by a head Morlock, and the Morlocks work, feed the Elois and support the Elois but also, harvest and eat them.

So there are lots of interesting twists and turns going on there.

And it's interesting, for example, the Morlocks, even though they're living underground, there's still some sort of divide there with the head Morlock.

So, H.

G.

Wells was playing around with these ideas.

The passage I've selected for you, however, today looks at the actual process of time travel itself, and I thought that would be an interesting angle to look at before we continue with our planning, just to get some additional ideas in terms of descriptive detail and how we can talk about time travel.

So this extract is from the rising action of the novel.

The time traveller is describing the sensations of time travel.

And as we're working through this, all I want you to do is to use this as inspiration for your own writing.

So I would encourage you to focus on the following.

The bits that are picked out and underlined, and in particular, thinking about the sensations that the time traveller experiences, particularly around the concept of time travel itself.

It should be exciting but you're going to see, just from this opening screen, that the sensations themselves are excessively unpleasant.

So the idea of giving maybe a little bit of an atypical response to what the reader might expect.

You'd think it would be really exhilarating but not.

Look at how H.

G.

Wells creates the sensation of speed and emotion, and then also look at how he uses colour within his writing.

These are techniques that you might be able to use yourself.

And the image was interesting because there was one particular splash of colour in the distance that you could focus upon.

Okay, let's have a look.

I'm afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling.

They are excessively unpleasant.

There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback of a helpless headlong motion.

I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.

As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing.

And again, here we've got this image of the time travelling quickly and it's like the flapping of a wing so we get the sensory image there, don't we? But look how dark and ominous it is too with the idea that it's a black wing.

The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute, marking a day.

So really familiar objects but behaving in a very unfamiliar way.

I suppose the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into open air.

I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things.

The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me.

The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.

Then in the intermittent darkness, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars.

Presently as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight.

Can you feel the change in sensation and in motion? The grey, the bright luminous colours.

The jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space, the moon a fainter fluctuating band and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.

So we get the sense of movement through the change in the colours and through the change in reaction from the time traveller in south.

I'll just give you control for a moment so you can have a little look and see if there are any ideas that you would like to adopt for your own response.

So control is over with you.

And welcome back.

So now, I'm going to give you control of the screen and what you're going to see here are all of the planning tools that we have used in our learning.

And there are different ones.

We've got a reminder of the criteria first.

However, then, we have got a descriptive writing planning grid, the box planning technique that we have used, a reminder of thinking about the pace within our narrative or descriptive piece.

It's the same thing.

We still need to generate the movement.

Then we've got the narrative writing planning grid, a reminder of thinking about our beginnings and thinking about our ending for a narrative, okay.

So, this is for you now to choose the right planning tool, depending on the type of task you're going to complete, whether you want to do the descriptive or the narrative.

So we are now handing over control, the plan through using the relative planning grid, for your task, over to you.

Take your time and resume when you are ready.

I will be waiting.

And welcome back.

So we are ready now to draught.

And what we're going to draught out are the opening and the ending.

And if you think logically about that, that's because thinking about the shape of our writing and thinking about the connection that we want to make from beginning to end is really important.

Do you want to have an absolutely different feel at the end of your extract, to your response, or do you want to have the cyclical nature to your writing where there are echos of the opening? So you're going to now try the opening and the ending.

You have the task again as well as a reminder for beginnings and endings, what makes an effective beginning and an effective ending.

And I really want you to concentrate on the connection between them.

So control, once again, is over to you.

When you draught, you are now trying to be more precise.

Your vocabulary choices are important and those patterns that you're trying to develop from beginning to end.

Over to you.

Take your time.

When you're ready, I'll be there.

Welcome back.

So now, next step, critique.

I would like you now to read through your work and make amendments or adjustments as needed.

So now you're going to be very precise with yourself.

You're going to look and think about the effect that you wanted to achieve, and we're now looking at details.

Could you vary your sentences? Have you used too many similar sentence types? Would a full stop be better there or would you like to use a dash? Would you like to use ellipses? What is it that you want to achieve and you can tweak? So as you go through this step, up against the success criteria, tweak, always thinking about the effect that you want to achieve, and whether the words you've chosen or the technique that you have chosen are doing now, whether they are creating that impact.

Okay, over to you.

And welcome back.

So, right.

Right, we're on to the right section.

So you now are in a position where you have your beginning and your end and you're very happy with them, and it is just about executing the remainder of your plan.

And that's exactly what I would like you to do today.

I would like you to take your time, complete the writing process, follow the plan carefully, constantly thinking about your design choices and the impact that you are achieving, and thinking about those bigger picture ideas that you are communicating about the opportunities that time travel might offer or the threats, the consequences of time travel.

So it's now over to you to complete your response.

You have a reminder of the task again and your success criteria to work with.

Enjoy the writing.

And welcome back.

So that completes the end of our unit on writing and on looking at fiction.

Thank you for your focus.

Don't forget to complete the exit quiz, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your learning today.